Introduction to Andy Warhol

In Hollywood in 1962, the breaking news was that the famous movie star Marilyn Monroe committed suicide at home. The cause of her death still makes public opinion from time to time. hot topics. Just a week after Monroe's death, a portrait of Monroe appeared in New York. The portrait of Monroe was printed on the canvas through silk screen printing and repeated images. This was very fashionable in New York at the time. Its author is Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol is a frequent visitor to CIGE. As the initiator and main advocate of the American Pop Art movement, he used silk screens to create famous images, from Marilyn Monroe to Chairman Mao is considered the most significant work of art of our time. He is himself the epitome of a successful artist, and his works are in the collections of almost every important collector and museum.

Warhol is the hero or anti-hero of modern art, because it is the ritual way in which art disappears, all the sadness in art, its negative transparency and indifference to its own authenticity. , pushed to the extreme. What this modern hero appears in art is no longer sublime, but the cynicism of the commodity world.

——Jean Baudrillard

If the emergence of the so-called "generation of 1863" headed by Manet marks the establishment of modernist art, the Pop movement The emergence of the 1960s showed that modernist art had come to an end. After a hundred years of ups and downs, the last major school of modernist art (Abstract Expressionism represented by Pollock) and its theoretical basis (avant-garde formalism advocated by Greenberg) began to collapse in the 1950s. What a coincidence is that exactly one hundred years later, in 1963, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Tom Weisman , Robert Rauschenberg, Asper Johns, Kim Deeney and other pop artists of the generation finally had the opportunity to gather together at the Duchamp retrospective exhibition in Los Angeles. Although the creative paths and artistic thoughts of these artists are different, they obviously share the same idea - as artists in the era of consumer society, mass culture and electronic communication, they should part ways with modernism.

Although the term Pop was invented by the British (the critic Alloway and the artist Hamilton), Pop Art is essentially an American product (we will talk about this later). Although Oldenberg, Johns, Rauschenberg and Lichtenstein took the lead in creating pop art in the United States, the artistic concepts and ideological content represented by pop art had to wait until Andy Warhol's work was fully revealed only after he moved from applied art to the field of "pure art" in the 1960s. To a large extent, it was the diminutive Czech-American who revolutionized the modernist tradition with his creations and his lifestyle.

Andy Warhol was born in the United States on September 28, 1928, to a Czech immigrant family. Warhol has long claimed to have been born in Cleveland, Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. However, according to the birth certificate in the appendix of Stern and Plimpton's book "Andy: An American Biography," Warhol was born in Frost City, a small town in Pennsylvania. However, Warhol insisted that the birth certificate was a forgery. We know that James Whistler, the early American modernist artist who died in a foreign country, also concealed his birthplace. But the difference here is that Whistler wanted to express a kind of cultural independence, while Warhol wanted to show his closeness to the culture in which he was embedded. In fact, Warhol’s father immigrated to the United States from the Czech Republic in 1912. He soon found a job with the Pennsylvania Coal Company, first as a construction worker and later as a coal miner. However, he had to wait until nine years before bringing his wife to the United States, which is enough to prove the hardship of the first-generation immigrant life. Warhol's father died in 1942 after three years of illness, leaving behind a wife and three sons. To make ends meet, Warhol sold fruit from a truck and worked as a clerk in a small grocery store. Warhol entered Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1945 to study art, preparing to become a middle school art teacher after graduation. While working in a department store during the summer, he participated in some window display design work and had the opportunity to look at some famous fashion magazines. These things not only gave him a sense of fashion, but also showed him a world completely different from his own life.

In 1949, at the instigation of a friend, Warhol went to New York to pursue his career. Although Warhol was shy and shabby when he first arrived there, he had good luck. During his first summer in New York, Warhol got an opportunity to illustrate an article in Glamor magazine called "Success is a Job in New York." The theme of this first work seems to have foreshadowed Warhol's creative content and life path in the next few years, that is, fashion advertising as an object of fetish worship, and the ladder as a symbol of personal ambition and pursuit of success. Soon, Warhol moved out of his friend's house and rented a basement apartment near 103rd Street and Manhattan Avenue. That place was full of young people who had just arrived in New York, and they were all very ambitious. Over the next few years, Warhol worked furiously and moved several times. His main work during this period was a series of fashion shoes created for I. Miller Company. Other commercial advertising works also began to appear frequently in famous newspapers and magazines, such as "The New York Times", "Glamour", "Vogue", " The New Yorker" etc. By this time, he had been accepted by the Manhattan commercial art and design community and quickly rose to prominence.

In 1954, Warhol received the American Society of Graphic Design's Outstanding Achievement Award for the first time. In 1956 and 1957, he received the Art Directors Club's Unique Achievement Award and the Highest Achievement Award. His first solo exhibition was "Andy Warhol: Fifteen Drawings Based on the Works of Capote" at the Sugar Gallery in New York in 1952. In 1956, his works were selected for the "Recent American Drawing Exhibition" held at the Museum of Modern Art. To handle the growing design business, The Andy Warhol Company was established in 1957. Around 1958, Warhol purchased a four-story house at Lexington Avenue and Eighty-seventh Street. In this way, in less than ten years, Warhol had successfully established a foothold in New York. He has a stable job, a very good income, a spacious house, a wide circle of friends, and is somewhat famous.

However, Warhol was not satisfied. What he needed now was to enter the so-called serious field of high art. In New York at that time, the second generation of Abstract Expressionist artists, led by Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, had emerged, and early Pop artists such as Johns and Rauschenberg were also very popular. In particular, the latter's sudden popularity and wealth made Warhol envious and unable to hold back. Just as he said to his friend: "I can do this too." However, Warhol's process of entering the circle of "serious" artists was not as good as his. It's as simple as you can imagine. Initially, he wanted to start with cartoon-style paintings, but soon discovered that Lichtenstein had already taken the lead in this regard. What's more, the fine art world seems reluctant to accept him. For example, while Lichtenstein's work was universally recognized, Warhol's cartoon-like paintings were rejected by all New York art dealers. For another example, although Johns and Rauschenberg were the subjects of Warhol's love, and their creative paths and styles were similar to Warhol's, Warhol's efforts to get to know and interact with them failed to receive immediate recognition. respond. Antonio, a friend of both parties, explained the reason to Warhol: "You are too fashionable, which makes them uncomfortable. Also, you are a commercial artist, which also makes them uncomfortable. Although they have also worked in had this kind of creation..., but they were doing it to survive, so they didn't even sign their name on that kind of work, and you won the award with great fanfare."

Indeed, it was with Warhol from the beginning. Something completely different from the modernist artists of the past. For example,

Van Gogh was unkempt and even cut off his ears, but Warhol wore a silver hairband and had plastic surgery on his nose; Gaugen could leave Paris and go to Tahiti to find The source of creation, Warhol could not create or even live once he left the business district of Manhattan; Pollock, the "last" modernist artist earlier than Warhol, still lived in solitary life, looking sad and taciturn all day long, but Warhol Go in and out of all social situations, have an easy-going and lovable temperament. According to his friend Cali's recollection, Warhol often attended five or six parties a week, sometimes attending two or three events in one night. He likes to have money and spend money, and he is good at collecting and managing money. Therefore, the image of the modern artist presented since the Romantic era as a down-and-out, lonely, angry artist outside a society that does not appreciate his talent no longer applies to Warhol.

From beginning to end, Warhol had an unusual affinity for the society and culture in which he lived. In "late capitalist culture" or "consumer society", he felt at home like a fish in water and eager to The work is recognized and affirmed by this culture and society. In response to his friend Lissambi's question, "Do you want to be a great artist?" Warhol replied: "No, I would rather be a celebrity." In this regard, he did succeed. Hence Lisanne's oft-quoted famous saying: Warhol was famous for being famous.

In the early 1960s, Warhol had been keenly aware of the direction of artistic development, which was the inevitable rise of Pop Art. He also realized that the opportunity to become famous overnight was right in front of him. All he needed was a creative theme that was different from the ordinary theme, and the way to launch his works was different from the ordinary way. In 1961, Warhol first exhibited his Campbell's Soup Can series in Los Angeles, thirty-two "portraits" of the same can. The reaction at the time was not particularly strong, not to mention it was in California. What Warhol needed was to become famous in New York. The following is the widely circulated story of how Warhol's first New York exhibition came about:

Warhol discussed holding a solo exhibition with a New York gallery owner. Warhol said: "I had to come up with something famous. It was too late for cartoons. I had to come up with something that really had an impact. It would be completely different from Lichtenstein and Rosenquist. It would be completely me. Personally, it doesn't look anything like theirs, but I don't know what it is. Can you give me an idea?" The gallery owner pulled out a two-dollar bill. Andy, if you paint this for me, I'll arrange an exhibition for you." Warhol immediately accepted the idea and went back to paint "Eighty Two Dollar Bills." This work was exhibited in New York in 1962 and immediately caused a sensation. Warhol said proudly: "In the future, anyone can be famous for fifteen minutes." In October of the same year, his works were included in the important exhibition "Pop Art: The New Reality" held at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. ists". Most of the famous American Pop artists we listed at the beginning participated in this exhibition, and Warhol finally successfully entered New York's "high" art world.

In the following years, he got out of control and successively launched "Two Hundred and Ten Coca-Cola Bottles", "Twenty-Five Colored Marilyns", "Marilyn Monroe's Lips", " Works such as "Red Ives", "Three Ives", "Orange Disaster", "Sixteen Jacqueline Kennedys", etc. have caused sensations again and again. In particular, his series of works featuring stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Breasley, and Elizabeth Taylor are particularly symbolic, and they have become empathetic portrayals of Warhol's childhood dreams. In 1964, Warhol held his first European solo exhibition in Paris. The gallery where his work "Flowers" was displayed was diagonally opposite the gallery where Monet's "Water Lilies" was displayed. Exhibitions followed in Toronto, Cologne, Stockholm, Berlin, London, Milan and other places, and Warhol became a representative figure of American Pop Art.

At the same time, he became busier. In addition to painting, film became one of his main creative media. In addition, in addition to accepting interviews with various media, universities on both sides of the United States have invited him to give lectures, and what he said is: "Pop means that anyone can do anything." Of course, socializing is still his main activity, However, in the 1960s and 1970s, his social circle was indeed different. First, his studio itself has become a social center, or more correctly, a dream world. College students, young painters, actors, models, Rolling Stones singers, underground film producers, art agents, magazine editors, etc. all gathered there, including drug addicts, homosexuals and various perverts. It may have something to do with the fact that Warhol, who had homosexual tendencies, attracted too much attention. Solanas, a fervent feminist who played a role in the films produced by Warhol, shot him several times and almost killed him. Warhol, who survived the catastrophe, did not remain silent because of this, but instead became famous among subcultural groups. At that time, leaders from the cultural and artistic circles also visited one after another. The painter Johns and others visited Warhol's studio. When the producer Persky held a party there in 1965, among the guests were the playwright Tennessee Williams and the poet Allen · Ginsburg. At the same time, he began to be accepted into the real upper class society.

He met Diana Verreland, editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine, and became a frequent visitor to the salon at the fashion designer Halton's home, where guests included movie star Elizabeth Taylor and dancer and musical star Liza Minnelli. At the White House, he was introduced to Henry Kissinger. After Carter was elected president, Warhol was invited to attend a party held by Carter in his hometown. Among the celebrities he interacted with were Margaret, wife of Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau, ballet prince Rudolf Neruyev and painter Salvador Dali. During this period, Warhol's main works were a series of portraits of celebrities, including a group of self-portraits. In fact, Warhol himself may have become the most famous artist America has ever produced, a face instantly recognizable to millions of ordinary people who have never entered galleries and museums. At this time, I wonder if he still remembers what he said to his father when he was a child, "Dad, I will become very famous in the future."

Margot Lovejoy said: "For the public Said that Warhol's lifestyle and artistic creation created a new phenomenon - the artist as a star. "Poet John Yao pointed out that the difference between Warhol and other artists (such as Andrew Wyeth) is that the latter became famous. Famous but hardly infamous, Warhol could be said to be both famous and infamous. But whether you use the term "famous" or "infamous", Warhol did become a cultural hero, a superstar. In this regard, among the American painters of the 1950s and 1960s, we may not find anyone comparable to Warhol. Perhaps, in the poet Ginsberg and the novelist Capote, we can see some shadows of Warhol.

Warhol's success and influence, or more accurately, the Warhol phenomenon, immediately became the subject of discussion by art critics, art historians, sociologists and philosophers. Even today, Warhol's name continues to appear in the discourse of so-called postmodernism. As early as 1968, Warhol, who was already famous, said: "If you want to know everything about Warhol, just look at my paintings, movies and my appearance. And here I am, on the surface. There is nothing behind it.” Like Warhol’s entire life, creation, and thought, this passage inevitably contains elements of sensationalism. As we have seen, there was not everything behind Warhol's fa?ade. Likewise, there is certainly nothing behind the surface of Warhol's work. However, it does reveal a basic aspect of his own creation and the formal characteristics and expression of Pop Art as a whole - the abandonment of the sense of depth and all related concepts of modernist art. Therefore, this oft-quoted quote remains a basic starting point for our understanding of Andy Warhol.

First of all, let us take a look at Warhol’s creative subject matter, which is the direct external expression of Warhol’s art. Roughly speaking, its creative themes can be divided into three categories. The first category is daily consumer goods, including the famous Campbell's soup can painting series, Coca-Cola painting series, Brillo soap and Hands ketchup device series, etc. Most of the subjects represented in this category are the most mundane, yet easily recognizable daily consumer products to all Americans. Take Campbell's soup cans, for example. Warhol himself grew up eating this ubiquitous and cheap food. Like the common people in the United States, he may have seen his familiar daily life in the red-labeled canned food. In choosing this subject, Warhol clearly wanted to avoid traditional art's reliance on the message or inherent meaning of the work. Warhol himself once said: At that time, he was "looking for something that could show the essence of nothingness, and Campbell's soup cans were such a thing." However, as will be discussed later, it is this "emptiness" that makes Warhol's entire creation has a certain "metaphysical" content.

Warhol’s second main theme is the celebrity portrait series. They include movie stars, pop stars, politicians, writers, and Warhol himself. Among them, the most well-known ones are Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Breasley, Elizabeth Taylor and other star series. Unlike previous portraits, most of Warhol's celebrity portraits were not created based on his own observations and understanding of the subjects, but were copied from movie stills, newspaper photos or posters. For example, all of Warhol's portraits of Marilyn Monroe were based on Monroe's famous still from the film "Niagara." This photograph by Gene Cornman shows a sexy movie star in its own right, rather than a real-life person. In fact, Warhol himself knew this.

After meeting Monroe, he once said to a friend, "Her screen image is completely different from her real life image. She is so shy." This clearly shows that Warhol consciously chose to be stereotyped by the mass media. Therefore, the idol image that has been accepted by the public serves as the basis for the creation of his portraits.

In addition to daily consumer goods and celebrity images, Warhol also created a series of works related to social violence and events, namely the "Disaster" and "Death" series. There are scenes showing social unrest, car collisions and plane crashes, electric chairs for executions, ropes for suicide, etc. Most of them come directly from newspapers, magazines and other media. The most famous examples are "One Hundred and Twenty-Nine People Killed (Plane Crash)" and "Red Race Riots". However, as Jamie James rightly points out: "While these paintings clearly reflect the reality of a turbulent period in America, it would be a mistake to think that the Catastrophe paintings were motivated by an attempt to comment on social reality itself." Indeed, there is no "tragedy" element or sense of "resistance" in this type of work. They're also shocking, but that's just because the subject matter has never been so explicitly represented in art before. For Warhol, his main motivation for choosing these subjects may have been their "media nature", that is, their tendency to generate sensational effects. "Hot" themes and "cold" colors are clearly the focus.

In this way, Warhol's creative themes have clearly shown the main content of his art, which is the product of consumer society, mass culture and communication media. They correspond to the three main characteristics of postwar American society: consumerism, commercialism and celebrity worship. Through the selection and expression of this type of subject matter, Warhol attempted to eliminate the boundaries between the so-called high culture and popular culture, avant-garde art and kitsch art, or in Buch's words, the boundaries between "museums and department stores", thus Make art something instantly understandable to everyone. Regarding mass media, Warhol himself once made it clear: "I do not change the media, nor do I make a distinction between my art and the media. I just use the media and repeat the media for my works. I believe that the media is An art." In fact, the subject matter and content of Warhol's works are no different from those of most pop artists. In summary, convenience foods, branded products, advertising posters, movie posters, city streets, highways, supermarkets, television, movies, cartoons, etc. constitute the creative themes of all Pop artists. However, compared to the works of other Pop artists, Warhol's works have produced a more sensational effect and a more far-reaching influence. The reason here is that, with unique forms and innovative techniques, they more clearly demonstrate the inherent aesthetic concepts and ideological content of Pop Art.

We will talk about the ideological nature of Warhol’s works later. Now let us first take a look at the aesthetic significance of the form and techniques of his works. In this regard, the most striking thing about Warhol's works is their non-artistic nature. He eliminated all traditional aesthetic, artistic composition and self-expression formal factors in his works with an almost cruel calmness. Although non-art or anti-art is a common feature of the entire Pop movement, in this regard, no one can cut off the connection with previous art more decisively and completely than Warhol. This is why, while Lichtenstein was accepted by the fine art world, similar cartoon paintings created by Warhol were rejected by all New York art dealers. Carter Ratcliffe obviously saw the reason here. He pointed out: "Lichtenstein's Pop images are painted in an extremely elegant way, and, beneath the gaudy content, they reveal the influence of the Western painting tradition on Highly mature variation in formal techniques. Therefore,...he has a close connection with the masters of modernism." In fact, we can also see a similar situation in the works of Pop artists such as Rauschenberg and Johns. . Warhol's works are obviously different. They not only change the themes of traditional paintings in terms of content, but also erase all traces of traditional paintings in terms of expression. Indeed, some critics have tried to find connections between Warhol and previous artists. Rainer Crony, for example, has argued that Warhol was influenced by Matisse, but as Lissambi rightly points out, “What was fascinating about Matisse for Warhol was that he could A piece of paper is randomly torn and then glued to another piece of paper, and the result is a work that is considered very important and valuable.

”

In fact, there is always something unsettling and disturbing in Warhol’s paintings, that is, they don’t seem to be paintings, but you can’t tell why they are not paintings. Traditional Western The basic formal elements of painting have almost completely lost their meaning in Warhol's paintings. The lines of his sketches are still smooth and powerful, but in works like "Thirty-two Campbell's Soup Cans", the lines have lost any expressive power. In works such as "Marilyn Monroe", color is still a major factor, but apart from the strong contrast of color blocks, we can no longer find the subtle changes and vibrations of color in works such as "Flowers", where the brushstrokes are completely absent. disappear, the texture is gone. More importantly, the violent passion and implicit stubborn rational inquiry behind the various formal innovations of modernist painters seem to have completely disappeared. The flatness or lack of depth constitutes the basic formal characteristic of Warhol's work.

In the book "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", Fredric Jameson once wrote. A comparison is made between Van Gogh's "Pair of Peasant Shoes" and Warhol's "Bejeweled Pink Fashion Shoes" to illustrate the significance of this flatness in Warhol's works. Jameson believes that Van Gogh and Warhol. The shoes created are the product of two different historical periods. The former shows "the entire objective world characterized by agricultural disasters and rural poverty, and the basic human life world whose main content is exhausting farming. One is reduced to it." The most cruel, dangerous, primitive and marginalized world. The latter comes from "ball halls or balls, high-society fashion or sexy fashion magazines," which shows a jeweled and commercialized world. More importantly, Van Gogh used oil paint to intentionally transform the "dry world of peasant objects" and violent transformation into the most radiant presentation of pure color, it is seen as a utopian gesture, an act of compensation that ultimately generates a new utopian realm of the senses,” and thus tells the viewer what lies behind it The vast world of life begs for its own hermeneutic interpretation (such as Heidegger's famous poetic interpretation). Warhol's fashion shoes reproduced from photographs are displayed lifelessly with a dull tone like a negative. In the painting, as in the window, they “no longer speak to us with any of the immediacy of Van Gogh’s shoes…indeed, they do not speak to us at all. In terms of content, we are now dealing with a far more definite fetish in both the Freudian and Marxian senses. "Ultimately, the flattening or lack of depth of the form results in a loss of appeal.

Jameson has seen this loss of appeal, or commodification of objects, play a role in Warhol's This is most clearly shown in the character-themed works. In this type of work, “stars such as Marilyn Monroe are commodified and transformed into images of themselves. "In terms of form of expression, Warhol's portraits only take close-ups of faces, and they are usually much larger than they would be in real life. However, he never depicts the subjects in detail, but only highlights the features he considers important. In the case of Marilyn For the Monroe series, it is the innocent eyes, sexy lips and golden hair that are obviously the sexy characteristics that are exaggerated and exaggerated by the media and widely accepted by society. Among the works in the Lynn Monroe series, "Golden Marilyn" may be more illustrative. In this work, a small portrait of Monroe is placed in the center of a large picture. The image itself is ambiguous, but it is not clear. It can still be recognized at a glance. It is worth noting that the background around the portrait is completely filled with the most monotonous gold, which makes the entire painting lose any expressive meaning and sense of depth. This can be seen more clearly by comparing "Marilyn Monroe" created in a few years. In de Kooning's works, although the beauty of Monroe's image is no longer the focus of expression, the painter still uses it as a focus. The unique approach accentuates her voluptuous figure, says Stella Stizzi, "De Kooning viewed this Hollywood 'pin-up' as a counterpart to the prehistoric fertility goddess. Both have sexy and plump bodies, and both symbolize the sexy concepts of the societies they represent. ” However, behind the rich colors and powerful brushstrokes of de Kooning’s works, there are still hidden emotions and understandings of the painter himself.

Which leads us to ask, is this Monroe? Why did the painter show her like this? But "Golden Marilyn" is different. Its treatment method clearly shows that the painter does not intend to express any psychological or biographical concepts of "depth" or "insight", and clearly rejects the clichéd concepts of "personality" or "character" . On the contrary, Warhol carefully stripped away the individual characteristics of the objects and transformed them into purely visible "things" - representations of images. In the words of Roland Barthes: "They freeze the stars (Marilyn, Liz) in their image as stars. There is no soul anymore, it is just an image state in the strict sense, because of the star's state of existence It's an idol." Faced with such an image, we no longer feel the need to ask ourselves questions about beauty or ugliness, reality or unreality, transcendence or concreteness. In "Golden Marilyn," the golden background immediately reminds us of medieval icons. Indeed, just as people in the Middle Ages stopped all doubts when facing icons and would not doubt the invisible existence of God at all, "Golden Marilyn" makes modern people worship the image of this sexy goddess without thinking.